Winter Soldier, Vol. 2: Broken Arrow (2012) What is up with Black Widow’s pointy head on this cover? She looks like a new red Crayon.Aside from Nathasha’s freakish melon on the front, this is another great installment in which the Winter Soldier is trying to stop a renegade assassin that he trained years ago and who was roused from cryogenic sleep when an earthquake shatters the frozen test tube he was napping in. Naturally, he’s a little grumpy and begins an elaborate revenge plan on Bucky and Natasha.It’s another solid spy story about the Winter Soldier from Burbaker and company, but this collection is a little short and ends on a cliffhanger so it feels like it needed a bit more to fill it out to a full length story of its own. It's mean, and it's personal. Wow, this is another amazing Bucky espionage thrill ride from Brubaker, and I love it. In the last volume, Brubaker established the point of the series - Bucky has faked his death so he can secretly take care of dormant threats from his years as a brainwashed Soviet assassin, with the Black Widow at his side - and this volume picks up on the last story as it goes to darker places. A Soviet sleeper agent has been activated, and he decides to take Bucky apart. This involves murdering people Bucky respects.. and doing worse to the people who mean the most to him. The reader gets to enjoy some huge action sequences, grim but occasionally sly dialogue, and beautiful artwork by Michael Lark (with the ever-amazing Steve Epting producing the covers). If, after a zombie apocalypse, it became impossible to find the first volume of this series, the second volume establishes enough background that a new reader would probably enjoy the spy story (even though, curiously, the collection ends on a cliffhanger that means the main story isn't even close to finished), but it works so much better as the next step in the Bucky story that Brubaker has been telling for years. See, the villain is scary because he's so good at what he does, but the next layer of that is that Bucky trained him. When we're cringing at how he carries out his plans, Brubaker is subtly reminding us that this is the kind of thing our hero did on a regular basis throughout the Cold War. It adds even more depth to Bucky, and I can't recommend this book highly enough.